The Third Party: A surreal odyssey from Belfast to Hiroshima

By Glenn Patterson

Breakfast in a hotel, a stroll through town then it’s off to a meting with clients, followed by dinner and bed … what could be more routine in the life of a travelling businessman?

But this is Hiroshima, no ordinary city. And for this Belfast businessman, the past is not quite so innocent as the product that he is selling. When he meets Ike, a fellow traveller from Belfast who just happens to be in Japan for a conference on ‘writing and conflict’, the narrator gradually finds that the past and its legacies cannot be ignored, whether he's in Belfast or Hiroshima.

Bristling with taut psychological energy, The Third Party is a knowing and powerful exploration of the legacies of war by one of our best Irish writers. Glenn Patterson is also the author of Burning Your Own, Fat Lad and The International, all published by Blackstaff Press.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Blackstaff Press Ltd
• Release date: Mar 30, 2014
• ISBN: 9780856402180

Glenn Patterson

Glen Patterson was born in Belfast in 1961 and studied for a Creative Writing MA at UEA, taught by Malcolm Bradbury. He is author of five novels. His first, Burning Your Own (1988), won a Betty Trask Award and the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. Glen Patterson has been Writer in Residence at the Universities of East Anglia, Cork and Queen's University, Belfast. Glenn Patterson was born in Belfast. The author of fifteen previous works of fiction and non-fiction, he co-wrote the screenplay of the film Good Vibrations. He is currently Director of the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen's University.

Book preview

Quixote

breakfast

1

I woke that morning, as I had woken all the previous sixteen thousand mornings of my life, as I would never wake again, knowing nothing whatever of the third party.

Another world entirely.

I hadn’t bothered with the curtains so high up, so far from the office buildings opposite, so long after they had been vacated for the night. The first thing I saw as I stood naked at the window was an eagle – on my mother’s grave, an eagle – sailing past two storeys below, dead straight, as though an invisible thread ran through it the length of the boulevard. Twenty storeys further below, a lone taxi, small as prey, took the curve from the road, round the ornamental gardens, to the hotel entrance. No one got out, no one came out. When I looked again the eagle was a quarter of a mile nearer its vanishing point, beyond the river. I pressed my cheek to the glass until its wings were the span of the street that in the next moment swallowed it.

Five forty-six. Four hours and fourteen minutes to my only appointment of the day. I lay on the bed, watching the window fill with light, listening to the traffic increase in volume, trying to hold at bay the thought that I could so easily not be here at all. My eyes must have closed again.

I stood up suddenly, as though propelled from a dream. No story, just pure foreboding. The knocking at my door ceased. The ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign was on my side, looking back at me.

‘Can you come back later?’ I called, rooting on the floor for shorts. I was sleep-swollen (how could a bad dream do that?), angled somewhere around a quarter past three. The clock said eight. I phoned home.

‘It’s midnight,’ my wife said.

‘I’m sorry. I woke and then fell asleep again.’

She yawned. ‘Never mind.’

I tried not to. I asked about Tom. Tom would be home next Thursday. And Jill?Jill was staying at her pal’s for a couple of days. (The Easter holiday had started.) She had been told, though, she was to be back for me returning.

My wife asked me was there any more biz about Our Friend Ike. The morning before last I had told her about finding him in my corridor, four floors astray, full as a lord.

‘Nothing to report,’ I said and my wife said she was glad for his liver’s sake to hear it. She yawned again. The radio was playing low in the background. She would have it on ‘sleep’, distraction from the silence of an empty house.

‘I’d better let you go,’ I said.

‘You should get his autograph.’

‘What?’

‘I’m just thinking, Tom or Jill might get a kick out of it.’

Tom was studying sports science. Jill was going for an A level in chat-room psychology. Ike was … well, not chat-room material, I wouldn’t have thought.

I said I’d see. I said I’d ring her in the morning from the airport.

I had hung up before I remembered about the eagle.

I showered and shaved, just showered and shaved: home tomorrow, home from my home from home. The hotel Hana wasn’t the first hotel to sell itself to me this way, but it was the first to go so far as to reproduce the colour scheme of the bathroom in my parents’ home circa 1978. The colours had been in and out of fashion at least once since (I was inclined to give the Hana the benefit of the doubt) and the hotel was currently undergoing another refurbishment, from the top down, or the bottom up, I hadn’t been able to work out which. Part of the Skylight restaurant and bar was closed, as was the entire floor between it and me. Even the lifts were being done, one at a time, so that you couldn’t be sure when you pressed the button whether the doors were going to open on yesterday’s hotel or tomorrow’s.

I checked my chin for shaving nicks – a bit more flesh to drag about than there was in 1978, but not, all things considered, that much – then dressed: dark grey suit, white shirt, old-gold ottoman rib tie. The cardinal rule in my line of business: the packaging is nine-tenths of the product.

The cleaning cart was half in, half out of the room opposite when I stepped out into the corridor. A disembodied brown hand rubbed a duster against its mirror image above the bathroom sink. I went back into my room for the ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign and hung it on the handle, ‘Please Clean’ side out.

I called the lift. Yesterday’s.

Our Friend Ike, as my wife called him, on the basis that what was mine was hers and that I had spoken to him twice, was already in the ground-floor restaurant. I saw his room number in the register when I stopped at the entrance to show my own key to the breakfast maître d’. Wooden trellises created the effect of four separate rooms in one, the busiest, as always, overlooking the access road, narrowed here to a single lane, and the ornamental gardens beyond. Glimpses of faces were all that the trellises afforded. I didn’t have to decide whether to look or avoid looking, but walked straight to an empty table next to the Western buffet, with its view inward to the kitchens, whose doors, as though magnetically opposed, never met at rest. (It was a stunt co-ordinator the waiters needed, not a maître d’.)

The buffet was continental in scope – bi-continental, even: Swiss-style muesli, Dutch and German cheeses, cold meats, croissants, bagels, rye bread, white and brown rolls, rollmop herrings, peppered mackerel fillets, watermelon slices, fresh fruit salad, tinned grapefruit segments, four jugs of just-squeezed juice, yoghurt, quark, cottage cheese and, rising above the rest, stainless steel hotplates heaped with hash browns, scrambled eggs, tomatoes and chipolatas.

It put me in mind of a book on medieval art I had got on trial offer from one of those clubs (I sent it back after a week) in which different scenes and even seasons were sometimes portrayed in the same painting. You had nearly to interpret the buffet before selecting your breakfast from it.

I fell in with the other chin-stroking Westerners on their slow circuit. No one wanted to be seen to make the wrong selection, the wrong interpretation. The trick was to outstay your fellows and then do a more or less blind sweep. After all, no matter how little you ate, once you had shown your key at the door you paid for everything. Or someone else paid for you. I had already had a week of croissants, rollmops, chipolatas and quark on the company’s directors. I had a ten o’clock appointment. I helped myself to a small dish of fresh fruit salad and observed as I took my seat the disappointed faces of those still standing, their options, it was somehow understood, limited by my restraint.

As I was raising the first spoonful to my mouth, a finger jabbed me through the trellis at my back.

‘What’s the matter? Do you not speak to the poor no more?’

I turned. Ike (he no more said ‘no’ for ‘any’ than I did) grinned to fit a wooden square.

‘All on your lonesome? Why don’t you come round here?’

‘I have a meeting at ten. I’m going as soon as I’ve eaten this.’

‘So, eat it round here.’

‘Thanks, but …’ I conveyed my meaning – and mango – with the spoon to my mouth.

‘Oh, come on,’ he said. ‘Live a little.’

I turned to him again, focusing on the eyes this time, the next square up. Green on pink. They showed no sign of believing that I was serious, that anyone would prefer their own company to his.

I lifted my bowl. What was the point in arguing?

There was no one at the Western buffet now. It was an effort not to spear a couple of squares of Leerdammer and a brown roll in passing, scoop some scrambled egg on to a plate.

Only as I came round the far side of the partition, past the Japanese buffet, did I realise that Ike had other company. He was leaning across the table, his back to me, talking to a Japanese woman – perhaps the same Japanese woman I had seen at his table when I walked through the lobby at half past midnight – and a man, Mediterranean maybe, who sat on the other side of him in shorts, vest, and bright green running shoes. I thought there was a fair chance he had forgotten already that he had insisted I join him. I could turn back the way I had come, leave the restaurant and take the lift up to my room. I would go to my meeting, do my remaining shopping, and have a quiet dinner; and when Ike got up for breakfast in the morning – if he did get up for breakfast two days running – I would be gone. But a chance inclination of his head just then brought his profile into relief against the backdrop of the ornamental gardens, through the window at the far end of the room, and I could no more have turned away then than I could fly. My dream came back to me, all in one frame, like the medieval paintings, like the Western breakfast buffet. Ambulances, police cars, something in the undergrowth: someone; a hotel cleaner speaking to a reporter in perfect English, ‘He was pedalling the air like it was a bicycle.’

The man in shorts nudged Ike’s hand. He broke off, turned his head slowly to face me, with every degree becoming ever more certainly a part of that dreamscape.

‘You look like you’ve seen a ghost,’ he said.

You’re the ghost, friend.

I shook my head and set my fruit salad on the table. ‘A sudden thought,’ I said.

‘You want to avoid those,’ Ike said and his companions smiled. ‘Let me introduce you: Kimiko Saotome, Dražen Majer.’

‘Kimiko,’ I said and, less confidently, ‘Dra–zhen.’

‘I was just saying,’ said Ike, rather than introduce me in return, ‘you were out here fighting the good fight on behalf of Northern Irish industry.’

I reached into my pocket for cards, as much to make up for Ike’s omission as anything. I gave him one while I was at it. He read the name. Dražen glanced at it once, nodded, and tapped the bottom edge on the table. Kimiko took hers in both hands and read it carefully, then set it beside her plate for further contemplation. She contemplated it so much she seemed to lose all appetite.

The food on the table was from the Japanese buffet: steamed fish and daikon, rice with flaked nori topping, miso soup and green tea.

Dražen folded his bottom lip over the top and stretched his legs out to one side, causing an oncoming waiter to improvise a hop to keep from going sprawling.

‘Listen,’ I said, ‘don’t let me interrupt you.’

‘You’re not interrupting,’ Ike said.

‘Not at all,’ said Kimiko and looked at the card on the table again. Next to it was a conference pack, a picture on the cover of a pen emerging from an exploding shell: ‘Writing Out of Conflict 2004’. ‘Please. Sit.’

I had met Ike three evenings before. I spotted an old airport identification tag on his flight bag as I waited to check my messages at the hotel reception.

‘Belfast City,’ I said.

He paused filling in his registration details and looked at me over the top of his sunglasses.

‘Your label. BHD. Have you been?’

I didn’t make a habit of seeking out Belfast connections when I was abroad, but Hiroshima was a very long way from home. Afterwards I wondered whether the look he gave me wasn’t one of annoyance that I had recognised his tag and not his mug.

‘Oh, I’ve been,’ he said, in the voice of one born there, ‘and, worse, they’re making me go back as soon as I’m finished here.’

‘I know what you mean.’ It was a perfectly pleasant April evening, twenty degrees: Hanami season, people picnicking under the cherry blossom along the riverbanks. Belfast, when I left it, was still struggling to shrug off winter. I waited while he copied out his passport number. ‘So what, big aeroplanes aside, brings you to Hiroshima?’

He smiled, briefly, at the spirit behind the joke. ‘Same as you, I suppose. Business.’

‘What line are you in?’

‘Actually’ – looking at me again over the sunglasses – ‘I’m a writer.’

His tone suggested it was something he should apologise for, though that’s not what his eyes said.

‘Newspapers?’

‘Novels.’

‘Ah!’ I had met enough journalists to last me a lifetime, but this was my first-ever novelist. ‘Anything I would have heard of?’

‘Tell me the novels you’ve heard of and I’ll stop you when you get to one of mine.’

‘I’m sorry.’ He had half turned away. ‘You must get asked that a lot.’

‘Just the odd time. What do you do yourself?’ he asked. I told him: plasticised PVC packaging. ‘Right, right.’

I got that a lot too, the glazed expression. I gave him a card anyway. He glanced at it. Not a flicker. Good.

‘I’m on a scouting mission,’ I said. ‘There’s a big conference here later in the year, mayors and trade delegations from all over Japan and the USA. What’s it they say? Like shooting fish in a barrel. You’d like to think you couldn’t miss entirely.’

His mouth squirmed with distaste: ‘they’ might say it; he would not. He was here for a conference himself, he said. Writing Out of Conflict.

‘That sounds interesting.’

‘Yes,’ he said a little absently and turned to finish registering, ‘I suppose it does.’ He laid down the pen and picked up his bag. ‘I hope you get what you’re looking for.’

‘So,’ he asked me at breakfast three mornings later, ‘did you get what you were looking for?’

In between times I had practically had to carry him back to his room, the memory of which, however hazy, might have accounted for the increased warmth in his words now.

‘Just about,’ I said. I had drawn a blank at the mayor’s office, but other than that … ‘And you? Good trip?’

‘Ask me this time tomorrow.’

This time tomorrow, I said, I hoped to be in the air.

Ike made a moue. ‘But what about your story?’

Dražen and Kimiko looked up at me, their interest piqued.

‘This man has a great story,’ Ike said. ‘Or so he tells me.’

I did